What if we told you that with just an Excel Sheet, a couple of simple add-ins, and a Java-based graphing applet, you can take trips across India — from the Northeast to Kanyakumari – and across domains – from oil & gas to digital advertising? Well, if anyone can take you on this exhilarating journey in two weeks, Professor Ziv Katalan can. During ‘Decision Models and Uncertainty’, our fourth core course at BITSoM, we had the incredible opportunity to join him on the ride.

We knew that Ziv — as he prefers to be called — had legendary status amongst his former students, but even that didn’t prepare us for his incredible dynamism and passion for teaching. In fact, he arrived at the first class having diligently done his pre-reads (unlike some of us): he had read all about each one of the 139 students in BITSoM’s founding class, and drew frequent connections between the concepts he was teaching and individual students’ backgrounds — from architects and authors to finance students and supply chain professionals. It was a remarkable way to customize the course while drawing on the diversity and collective experiences of the batch.

The course began with linear programming (i.e., formulating managerial decisions using algebraic expressions) and progressed to integer programming and the use of Monte Carlo simulations. Yet, it quickly became clear that analytics were a mere tool rather than the objective of the course: our goal was to understand how to interpret results. Each session focused on one or more real-world scenarios, spanning areas ranging from wine manufacturing to construction, and Ziv would ask us to think about data from the perspective of various stakeholders.

“What would the CEO want to do?” he would ask. “The CMO? The CFO?”

In this way, each session superimposed an additional layer of complexity on the concepts taught earlier, slowly taking us from data analytics to the depths of business management. These layers culminated in a case assignment, which required us to apply the methods we had learnt and make recommendations to the CEO. The twist, however, was that robotically analyzing the numbers was not enough to do this. We also had to test the intuitions we had developed during the course to articulate expectations, detect red herrings and make defensible decisions.

As challenging as the course material was, Ziv expertly helped us navigate it with his gift for visualization: for example, graphs of linear programs were presented to us as maps, with each quadrant of the graph representing directions or even parts of India. We built fictional houses when learning about PERT networks, sold fictional newspapers when studying the Newsvendor Model, and baked (sadly) fictional cakes … but we also developed a very real bond with Ziv. “Excuse me, Professor?” “How can I help you, Student?” became a common running joke, as Ziv insisted that we call him by his first name if we wanted him to do the same. 

Ultimately, and rather ironically for a course with the word ‘uncertainty’ in its name, we were 100% certain about how enriching and transformative Ziv’s course was. If we have the option to take another course with Ziv during our 2-year program at BITSoM, we won’t need to build any decision models: the optimal solution is always ‘Yes’!